Family Tragedy Sunk Her Into Depression—Here’s How Marathons Helped Her Heal

In her 30s and early 40s, Mary Cole, D.D.S., a dentist in Decatur, Illinois, was in a dark place. Those years had been filled with heartbreak, as she and her husband struggled to build a family.

In 2003, after three years of in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments, she finally became pregnant with triplets, whom they named Faith, Hope, and Charity.

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“I had three miracles,” she said in a phone call with Runner’s World. But after giving birth to the girls, tragedy soon followed. “Hope was only a gift to us for three days. She passed away after a complex heart surgery.”

After a few years of trying to conceive again, she eventually gave birth to a son, Ronnie, in 2007. Then at age 40, after a successful implantation of their frozen embryos, she became pregnant with twins.

“I was ecstatic,” she said. But a few months later, she suffered a miscarriage. “It was pretty traumatic. I was too sad to find out if they were boys or girls.”

With the heartbreak of her pregnancy loss and the passing of her daughter, Hope—coupled with the stress of raising her young children and a demanding work schedule at her family’s dental clinic—Cole sank into a depression that made it difficult to find motivation to exercise. For 10 years, she hardly worked out at all.

Then, around the same time she lost her pregnancy with the twins, her mother, who suffers from myasthenia gravis (an autoimmune disease), suffered a stroke. Her mother survived the incident and is alive today, but Cole’s uncle passed away from a stroke at 60, and her aunt died at age 45 from a brain aneurysm.

“At that moment, I realized I just wanted to be healthy and happy,” she said. “There was so much death in my family.”

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In fact, most of her relatives were about 100 pounds overweight, and they were dying young from strokes and autoimmune diseases, she said.

“I didn’t want that to happen to me,” she said.

So in 2014, when she was 41, she made a commitment to start living healthier in body and mind. A friend gifted her the book John Robbins’s Healthy at 100—“which sounded like a good goal to me,” she said. She adopted an entirely whole foods diet free from GMOs, high fructose corn syrup, and artificial sweeteners. Nuts, seeds, fish, rice, and protein shakes full of greens became part of her regular rotation.

Along with diet, Cole knew she needed to make a habit of exercising. She hadn’t run much growing up—instead of trainers, she had to wear special shoes to correct her pigeon-toed feet for much of elementary school. Slowed by the footwear, she was often picked last for teams in gym class. “I wasn’t a fast runner,” she said. “And when you’re young, you have to be fast.”

It wasn’t that she was a stranger to fitness, though: In her 20s, she joined the Navy with her husband, also a dentist, and they served for eight years. Cardio conditioning and strength training were part of her daily routine in the Navy—although she preferred swimming and core workouts to running.

Flash forward to 2014: Cole decided to give running a second chance. She said that the running community, more so than any other exercise group, attracted her with its positivity and welcoming nature.

“Runners are always so happy,” she said. “For the most part, they are genuinely kind people that are encouraging to everyone, no matter how fast or slow you are.”

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She set her sights on a local 5K that year. “I had to give myself a goal, or I knew it would be easy to make excuses,” she said. For more motivation to get out the door, she made dates to run with friends as well as the local running group in Illinois. At first, she only went one or two miles at a time, breaking up the distance with walking breaks. After each run, she felt flooded with endorphins and a sense of accomplishment.

“The runs lifted me up,” she said. When the day of the 5K came, she pushed herself through the distance, enjoying the comraderie of other runners. “I was hooked. I couldn’t get enough of it.”

Riding the high of that first race, she completed a half marathon just a few months later. “After I did the half, I figured I could go the full distance,” she said. “I knew I had the endurance.” So in October 2015—still barely a year into running—she completed her first marathon in Springfield, placing third in her age group with a time of 5:10:10.

“I loved the distance,” she said. “I wasn’t worried about time, but just wanted to have fun and get that feeling of accomplishment.”

Having checked off her three major race distance goals after Springfield, Cole, age 42 at the time, had a new goal in mind: finishing a marathon in all 50 states. The races gave her the opportunity to travel, and completing them would put her in a circle of less than 500 women who have accomplished the feat.

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“I wanted to finish them all by the time I was 50,” she said. “But then I got a little impatient.”

Within the next two years and nine months, Cole completed 26.2 mile-races in each state—which means that, on average, she was traveling and racing a marathon one out of every three weekends. “By the end of it, though, I was running a marathon every weekend,” she said.

To recover from all that pounding on her legs, Cole said she didn’t run much at all during the week, but rather cross-trained with “anything that got my heart rate up,” like swimming, biking, yoga, Pilates, and Zumba classes.

“A couple times a week, I met a friend to do a short morning run of about three miles,” she said. “Every race was a training run for another marathon.”

In April 2018, Mary Cole completed her 25th race, the Garmin Marathon, in the “Land of Oz” just outside of Kansas City, Kansas.

Mary Cole

One way to distinguish all of the races is the costume she was wearing in each: At the Garmin Marathon in Olathe, Kansas (her 25th race), she was Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. In her 50th marathon in Juneau, Alaska, on July 28, 2018, she dressed as Superwoman. “I want marathons to be fun,” she said. “I dress up a lot according to the marathon theme.”

“I was sick of being sad, and running brought me joy again.”

Crossing the line in five hours and 17 minutes, she became the 450th certified woman to complete the 50-state marathon circuit.

Today, Cole looks and feels drastically different from before. She dropped from a size 10 to a size 6, and has the energy of her 20-something self. Perhaps most importantly, though, she has a beaming smile that’s not easily wiped off, especially when she’s surrounded by her family and friends at a race finish.

“I think you’re never too old to start something new,” she said. “I was sick of being sad, and running brought me joy again.”

Hailey MiddlebrookDigital EditorHailey first got hooked on running news as an intern with Running Times, and now she reports on elite runners and cyclists, feel-good stories, and training pieces for Runner's World and Bicycling magazines.

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